Richard Serra

Richard Serra was born in 1939 in San Francisco, USA. He studied from 1957 to 1961 at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and from 1961 to 1964 at Yale University, Connecticut, where he worked with Josef Albers on Albers seminal book, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963).

Few artists have pushed printmaking to such sculptural extremes as Richard Serra, who has been making prints for over 45 years. His monumental and physical way of working serves to convey weight, stability and density. His recent works are made using Paintstick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and melted wax. The mixture is moulded into large cylindrical sticks, then pressed down into a meat grinder and blended in an industrial dough mixer with silica. This is then applied in two layers, by a gloved hand, directly onto the handmade paper, pushing and rubbing in a downward direction. By layering the Paintstick, Serra asserts the physicality of the prints.

Serra's large-scale, site-specific sculptures can be found all over the world. Selected solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, (2014); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Menil Collection, Houston (2011); Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005). His works are housed in major collections all over the world.

Serra has participated in Documenta 1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987; and in the Venice Biennale 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013. In 2015, he was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l'Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur, France, and in 2018 he received the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts.